“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Joe Nocera: Libor’s Dirty Laundry
Here in the early stages of the Libor scandal – and, yes, this thing is far from over – there are two big surprises.
The first is that the bankers, traders, executives and others involved would so openly and, in some cases, gleefully collude to manipulate this key interest rate for their own benefit. With all the seedy bank behavior that has been exposed since the financial crisis, it’s stunning that there’s still dirty laundry left to be aired. We’ve had predatory subprime lending, fraudulent ratings, excessive risk-taking and even clients being taken advantage of in order to unload toxic mortgages. [..]
Which brings me to the second big surprise. Britain and America have reacted to the Libor scandal in completely different ways. Britain is in an utter frenzy over it, with wall-to-wall coverage, and the most respectable, pro-business publications expressing outrage. Yes, Barclays is a British bank, and the first word in Libor is “London.” But still: The Economist ran a headline about the scandal that read, in its entirety, “Banksters.”
Yet, on these shores, the reaction has been mainly a shrug. Perhaps we’re suffering from bank-scandal fatigue, having lived through Bank of America’s various travails, and the Goldman Sachs revelations, and, most recently, the big JPMorgan Chase trading loss. Or maybe Libor is just hard to gets one’s head around.
New York Times Editorial: The Square Off Over Jobs
There’s no solace in the employment report for June, released Friday. The economy added a paltry 80,000 jobs last month, leaving no doubt that the economy is slowing. In the past three months, the economy averaged 75,000 new jobs a month, compared with 226,000 in the prior three months. The jobless rate in June held steady at 8.2 percent, which is down from the recession peak of 10 percent in October 2009 but still very high.
Who is to blame?
How can it be fixed? [..]
The question then is why the recovery under Mr. Obama has not been stronger. Part of the answer lies beyond the control of any American politician, including the euro zone crisis and, more recently, the slowdown in China. But part is the result of obstructionist Republican politics, including the fiasco in 2011 over raising the debt ceiling, which dented confidence in Congress’s ability to steer the economy.
Recently my friend and colleague Bill Scher challenged progressive critics of President Obama’s conciliatory approach toward corporations with a New York Times op-ed entitled “How Liberals Win.” Far from being “business as usual,” Bill writes, “the Supreme Court’s upholding of Mr. Obama’s health care law reminds us that the president’s approach has achieved significant results.” [..]
Sorry, Bill. I’m with those who have concluded that the Obama White House has failed, both pragmatically and politically, on a number of key progressive issues. In my view, believing otherwise requires an almost ahistorical view of liberalism. We can’t preemptively limit the definition of “liberal victory” to whatever corporate interests will allow.
Wherever the truth lies, the road ahead is clear: We can’t allow the radical right to take power this year. But we need to fight for results, not politicians, by building a mobilized and truly independent citizens’ movement.
Mark Weisbrot: Federal Government Can Restore Full Employment. If Only it Wanted to Do So
Three years after our worst recession since the Great Depression officially ended, the U.S. economy is still very weak. The people most hurt by this weakness are the unemployed and the poor, and of course the two problems are related. We have about 23 million people who are unemployed, involuntarily working part-time, or have given up looking for work — nearly 15 percent of the labor force. And poverty has reached 15.1 percent of the population; amazingly, a level that it was at in the mid-1960s.
The first priority of the U.S. government should therefore be restoring full employment. This is a relatively easy thing to do. As Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman aptly put it: “It’s like having a dead battery in a car, and while there may be a lot wrong with the car, you can get the car going remarkably easily, if you’re willing to accept that’s what the problem really is.”
Most economists are well aware what the problem really is, since it is so simple and basic. The economy lost about $1.3 trillion in private annual spending when the real estate bubble burst in 2007, and much of that has not recovered. State and local governments continue to tighten their budgets and lay off workers. If the federal government had simply funded these governments’ shortfalls, we would have another two million jobs today.
Ruslan Pukhov: Why Russia Is Backing Syria
MANY in the West believe that Russia’s support for Syria stems from Moscow’s desire to profit from selling arms to Bashar al-Assad’s government and maintain its naval facility at the Syrian port of Tartus. But these speculations are superficial and misguided. The real reason that Russia is resisting strong international action against the Assad regime is that it fears the spread of Islamic radicalism and the erosion of its superpower status in a world where Western nations are increasingly undertaking unilateral military interventions. [..]
To people in Moscow, Mr. Assad appears not so much as “a bad dictator” but as a secular leader struggling with an uprising of Islamist barbarians. The active support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey’s Islamist government for rebels in Syria only heightens suspicions in Russia about the Islamist nature of the current opposition in Syria and rebels throughout the Middle East.
Finally, Russians are angry about the West’s propensity for unilateral interventionism – not to mention the blatantly broad interpretation of the resolutions adopted by the United Nations Security Council and the direct violations of those resolutions in Libya.
Recent Comments